Heroic and Eternal Fire earned two victories Wednesday and became the first two teams to advance to the group stage on Day 1 of Intel Extreme Masters Katowice 2024 in Poland.
Eternal beat Rebels Gaming 13-4 on Inferno and 13-9 on Mirage to advance, and Heroic outlasted BIG in three maps, winning Nuke 13-8 and dropping Vertigo 13-7 before clinching with a 13-7 win on Anubis. Eternal and Heroic join eight directly invited teams for the group stage, which begins Saturday.
Rebels Gaming and BIG dropped down to Round 2 of the lower bracket.
Eternal Fire crushed BetBoom Team 13-1 in the best-of-one upper-bracket Round 1 to advance. Heroic edged Astralis 13-11 to advance to Round 2 of the play-in.
Twenty-four teams are competing for a share of the $1 million prize pool, the first $1 million prize pool in Europe since Counter-Strike 2 launched in September. Sixteen teams are competing in the double-elimination play-in stage, and six more will join Heroic and Eternal in the group stage.
On Wednesday, Ozgur “woxic” Eker led the all-Turkish Eternal Fire with a plus-14 kills-to-deaths differential on 31 kills against Rebels Gaming. Ali “Wicadia” Haydar Yalcin also had 31 kills for Eternal.
Denmark’s Nico “nicoodoz” Tamjidi led Heroic with 52 kills and a plus-14 K-D differential in their win over BIG.
The MongoIZ will play Team Spirit on Thursday while GamerLegion and Virtus.pro battle in the other Round 2 match with the group stage on the line.
Meanwhile, four elimination matches will be contested Thursday in Round 1 of the lower bracket:
–Cloud9 vs. BetBoom Team
–Astralis vs. ENCE
–FURIA Esports vs. Apeks
–M80 vs. Rooster
The play-in stage ends Friday.
PRIZE POOL
1st: $400,000, 3,000 BLAST Premier points (Qualifies to IEM Cologne 2024, BLAST Premier World Final)
2nd: $180,000, 2,000 BLAST Premier points
3rd-4th: $80,000, 1,200 BLAST Premier points
5-6th: $40,000, 500 BLAST Premier points
7-8th: $24,000, 300 BLAST Premier points
9-12th: $16,000
13-16th: $10,000
17-20th: $4,500
21st-24th: $2,500
The event will be broadcast live on the ESL Counter-Strike Twitch and YouTube channels, with all matches also available on-demand on YouTube.
IEM Katowice will also include a $500,000 standalone Starcraft II competition, with $150,000 going to the winners. The 24-team event will again feature the IEM Expo from Feb. 8-11.
–Field Level Media